


beyond

by aquamarine_nebula



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: M/M, Reminiscing, can't wait for this fic to be completely destroyed by jonny in 5 days, speculation fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:48:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26653174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aquamarine_nebula/pseuds/aquamarine_nebula
Summary: Martin talks to Annabelle. Who's to say who is weaving the stronger web?
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 2
Kudos: 41





	beyond

Annabelle didn’t seem dangerous, and that was probably the most dangerous thing about her.

She had very proudly ushered them both to the dining room, a stately, extravagant thing that stretched out for what seemed like miles, showed them an impressive array of breakfast foods, and served herself. Right now, she was neatly cutting up some steamed salmon and spinach omelette, smiling warmly every time Martin looked at her.

The food didn’t turn to spiders in Martin’s mouth, and after an encouraging smile from Jon he wasn’t too freaked out to serve himself with the omelette. Jon picked at his fruit, obviously not any hungrier than he had been before.

“We’re so glad you managed to join us,” Annabelle said. “We were worried you had got lost!” Her laugh tinkled, and if it wasn’t for the spider webs holding part of her skull closed, Martin would have been reassured by such a human sound.

“Where is Salesa?” Jon asked.

Annabelle placed a forkful of salmon in her mouth and eyed Jon. “He’s in the garden. He’s waiting for you. And as you do that I’ll speak to Mr Blackwood.”

They exchanged a look, and Jon’s hand found his under the table to squeeze it tightly. “Why are you here?” Jon asked Annabelle, and Martin waited for the static, thrumming through his body until his teeth itched. But it didn’t come, and Jon sat back in his seat with a giddy laugh. “It doesn’t work!” he exclaimed, and Annabelle smiled. All teeth. 

Painfully politely, she spoke again. “Not here.”

Jon seemed delighted by the idea, but Martin could only feel scared. 

“Right,” Jon said. He looked at Martin, a silent promise, before looking at Annabelle again. “You said Salesa was in the garden?”

“Near the old stables. Turn right out of the front door, follow the path until it splits. Go under the arch and you’ll see him.”

He checked his pocket for a tape recorder, before leaving Martin with a final squeeze of his hand.

Annabelle waited until he’d left the room before tutting. “He hardly touched his food.”

“That’s not the food he eats these days,” Martin explained, and Annabelle gave him a compassionate smile, feigning camaraderie. 

“That must be so hard for you, Mr Blackwood. To have seen him descend from being human to being...that.” She gestured to the plate of fruit.

“There’s more to being human than  _ eating _ .”

“Oh, I know. And I can’t say anything.” She tapped the cobwebs covering her head, and Martin winced as her finger sunk into the cavity of her skull. “None of us are very human these days. Even Salesa.” She propped her chin on her hand, watching him curiously. “Except you.”

Martin stayed quiet.

“How did you resist the pull when the apocalypse started?”

He had options. He could refuse to talk. He could lie, though he doubted any lie even  _ he _ spun would get past a master of puppets. And regardless, he and Jon had decided to get all the information they could to discover what this place was.

“I didn’t resist the pull.” Annabelle’s eyes brightened. “When the apocalypse hit, I was outside the cabin Jon and I were staying in. The cabin, it turned out, was a domain. I was pulled back to the domain by my love for him. That’s what the entitles used, in the end.”

“How?”

“It was Corruption. That was the domain.”

“Interesting. And you left?”

Martin shrugged. “I don’t know, Annabelle. Maybe it’s about knowing the truth of the entities. Maybe you can’t be trapped if you know it’s a lie.”

“And what do you think this place is?”

Martin breathed out slowly. “I don’t know. I’m not the eldritch god of knowledge here.”

“Neither am I, Mr Blackwood.”

He had thought about it. Not discussed it with Jon, yet, preferring to parse through what he saw before sharing it, but Jon was as blind as he was here, and revelling in every moment of it. “I think it is an oasis. A perfect haven in the middle of... _ hell _ . I think if Jon and I stayed here, we would be safe.”

Her eyes were dark and sharp, reading every move he made. Maybe she could see every string that had pulled him into the decisions he had made, every web he’d woven. He was made to be part of the Web, even if he rejected it. “Very astute,” she said. “You see things very clearly, Mr Blackwood. And that’s what I’m offering you. You can stay. Jon too, if you would like. You can stay, and rest, and never see the horrors beyond our borders ever again.”

Martin stayed silent. There was always something, something which made them trip up, that revealed their plan. A short glance, a quirk of the mouth, a twitch in the hand.

“Although, do you want Jon to stay?”

“What?”

Her smile was cutting. “Did you not think it was strange, just how attached you became in such a short amount of time?”

Martin remembered the first time he’d seen Jon, in those ridiculous trousers and waistcoat, and the waves of his hair tumbling to his shoulders, the crease between his dark brows. “Do I really need to explain the concept of ‘attraction’ to you? Surely you’re not  _ that _ far from humanity.”

“You don’t need to explain anything, Martin. The web tied you together.”

A deep breath, fixing the image of Jon slowly creeping out from behind him to carefully introduce himself to a highland cow, cold hands grasping at his sides to warm up and listen to him squeak, Jon diving into the Lonely to save him and pull him back.

It was easy to step back, to curve his shoulders in, to resign himself to his love for Jon being nothing more than a manipulation. It wasn’t that the thought didn’t  _ scare _ him, but he wasn’t quite so easily cowed these days, it had never been so easy to manipulate him. “What does that mean?” he said, pushing defensiveness.

“Jon has been marked very deeply by the web. There’s something about an encounter when you’re a child, it roots in much deeper than the same thing as an adult. So it is very easy to pluck the strings. Why do you think Elias chose you? By his own volition?”

He kept his posture and voice carefully defensive, anything to make her think she was poking at a raw wound. “Because of my lack of connection to people. And anyway, Jon pulled me out of the Lonely, that wasn’t  _ web _ .”

Annabelle smiled and shook her head, patting his shoulder warmly. “The entities are jealous, Mr Blackwood. They don’t like to let their prey run into another domain. But you don’t have to be prey any more. Stay here. This place is perfectly safe, perfectly shielded from everything that Jon brought here. We can mourn the world, but we aren’t obligated to fix it.”

It was tempting, that was the problem. But Annabelle had easily underestimated how much he wanted revenge, how he would give almost anything to feel the life choke out of Elias between his hands.

“So that’s it? Stay here?”

Annabelle stood up, brushed off her dress. “That’s it. I think I would enjoy your company, Mr Blackwood. And frankly, it would be better than being alone with Mikaele, with  _ anyone _ , for the rest of eternity. If Jon wants to join, then so be it, but I think his attitude would wear thin.”

“That’s…” he sighed, placing his fork on his plate. “Okay, that’s fair.”

Annabelle gave him one last, warm smile, and made for the door. “Think about it, okay?”

Tempting, but it would become a horror. To stay here, enshrouded in the beauty and opulence of the house and gardens, when just over the hill people were living their worst nightmares over and over. To pity those trapped, but do nothing to help them. It would enrage Martin, and it would enrage Jon, too. The guilt would turn to resentment.

Still tempting, though.

-

He found Jon sat on a bench under a willow tree, looking out over the unbearable beauty of a small, natural lake. “There’s no wildlife,” he said when Martin sat next to him, handing him a cup of tea. “There’s a lot, it’s a good replica, but there’s no wildlife.”

“Maybe Annabelle can make some squirrels out of spiders? I’m sure if I asked her nicely--”

“No! Don’t even joke about that,” he said, shuddering, but his eyes still creased in a smile. “It’s unnerving, right? Not hearing any wildlife.”

“Yeah, where are the urban foxes pushing bins over? Stray cats fighting over turf?” Martin joked. “You’re right. It’s a bit too pristine.”

“What did Annabelle say?”

Martin paused. “She said this was a safe space. That if we wanted to, we could stay and nothing bad would happen to us.”

“That’s all?”

It took all he had to push the next words out rather than fold them into his mind to fester, worrying at them incessantly until they burst in a wild panic. “She said the web was the reason for...for us. That we’re only together because it pulled us together.” Jon’s hand slipped into his, and Martin clutched as if it were a lifeline. “Do you think that’s true?”

“I worry about it sometimes,” Jon admitted.

Martin laughed with no humour. “And how do you cope with that?”

“It’s naive. But I don’t think the entities have anything to do with love. Maybe the web tied us together at the beginning, but if that was the case then it also tied us to Tim and Sasha and…Basira, Melanie, Daisy.” He faltered at the last name. “My bonds with them are, or...or were,  _ different _ .”

“What do we have apart from shared trauma, though?”

Jon watched him for a moment, tucked a strand of hair behind his ear. “You know when you were staying in the institute after Prentiss, and whenever I stayed overnight we would drop everything we were doing at nine in the evening and cook something together?” He took a sip of his tea, so he didn’t have to look Martin in the eye. “We managed to choreograph that pretty well, actually. I think we could have done it with our eyes closed with only minor accidents by the time you moved out again.”

“You played such boring music,” Martin said with a laugh. It was always on Classical FM, and Jon would do nothing but glower at him darkly if he tried to introduce something even marginally more modern. 

Jon kissed his teeth in irritation and nudged his shoulder. “Your awful taste aside, we have that. That walk down to the sandwich shop,” he continued.

“With the guy who refused to speak to us in anything but French even though he’d talk to everyone else in English? What was his deal?”

Jon shrugged, but looked away with shifty eyes.

“Come on, what was it?”

“I checked a few domains back out of curiosity,” he admitted.

“And?”

“He had a crush on me, apparently.”

“And...what, that made him speak French?”

Jon shrugged again. “I didn’t say I  _ understood _ why. He’s in a Flesh domain now,” he said sadly, and Martin shook his head.

“Non-trauma related, remember?”

He took a deep breath. “We always used to take the long way to the sandwich shop. There was that patch of grass which had those ducks. You always used to tear off a piece of your bread to feed one of them. And when we were walking, we never talked about...work, or monsters or anything. You used to recommend me poetry to read.”

“Which you never did read,” Martin accused, dropping a kiss onto his shoulder.

“Well,” Jon said, clearing his throat. “I didn’t like poetry, then.”

“Whenever we had a work social, you always used to sit next to me,” Martin said. “I never understood why, you didn’t seem happy about it but you kept on doing it.”

Jon’s fingers no longer caught in knots in his hair when he ran them through it, and he shifted a little uncomfortably on the bench. “I...liked talking to you outside of work. Tim...I could never predict what kind of mood he would be in, Sasha was lovely but always greeting people and trying to bring them over to our table. And you...you seemed really good at noticing where my head was. You were happy to talk or to let me be silent.” He put his head on Martin’s shoulder. “I don’t know if we’d be together with that, but we don’t just have shared trauma.”

“Okay,” Martin said, sinking against Jon in relief.

Jon seemed happy to sit and watch for a while. That pained furrow that had been between his eyebrows since the world ended had finally smoothed, and for the first time in months, he let himself breathe. With the oversized sweater he’d definitely pinched from Martin’s side of the wardrobe, a mug of tea held between his hands, he looked the same as he did in Scotland.

“Salesa said that time is...frozen, or something? I don’t know what that means in comparison to the mess which is--” he waved a hand in the general direction of the mausoleum, “--but we can stay for a while. I don’t think we’re in danger here. We can rest.”

“I’d like that.”

“And if...if when we decide...you--” he bit his lip. “You don’t have to come with me, if you don’t want to.”

Martin sighed. It was better than the cold of that lonely house, at least. He could remember everything, the sun was warm against his skin, but  _ still _ . “You’re underestimating how much I want to kill Elias,” he said. Jon winced. “And how little I want to stay with them.” He nodded to the house. “And you’re underestimating how much I want to stay by your side. You’re stuck with me now, Jon.”

Jon pulled his knees up, shuffling closer so he was almost in Martin’s lap. “This shouldn’t be your fight,” he said quietly. “But I’m glad I’m stuck with you.”

Martin smiled as he kissed Jon’s forehead, wrapped an arm around his shoulders, and watched the gentle flow of the water in the lake.


End file.
